The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

I browse among the trestle tables of apples and pears and vegetables too misshapen for Pearl Corp, home-cured bacon, honey, eggs, marijuana, cheese, homebrewed beer and poitín, plastic bottles and containers, knitted clothes, old clothes, tatty books, and a thousand things we used to give to charity shops or send to the landfill. When I first moved to the Sheep’s Head Peninsula thirty years ago, a West Cork market was where local women sold cakes and jam for the craic, West Cork hippies tried to sell sculptures of the Green Man to Dutch tourists, and people on middle-class incomes bought organic pesto, Medjool dates, and buffalo mozzarella. Now the market’s what the supermarket used to be: where you get everything, bar the basics found in the ration boxes.